What am I talking about when I say, “Feed your mind”? Well, one thing I noticed, it was actually on Facebook. That’s where I keep up with old friends as well as family and get all kinds of information. I noticed there were several posts on there asking questions about books and books that people had read recently.
One said, “What is a favorite book you’ve read recently?” The second one said, “What’s the most influential book you’ve read recently?” What got me wasn’t the questions, but was actually some of the responses of people saying, “Well, I don’t read,” or, “I don’t have time to read books or digest content,” something of that nature. It was all excuses about why you couldn’t.
It caught me by surprise as I was thinking about it last night. I have a newborn baby, and my wife was frustrated. The baby just would not go to sleep and kept crying. So, I threw on a backpack and I went for a walk. Most people would think, “Wow, what a waste of time.” Obviously spending time with your child is not a waste of time, but also during that time I digested two chapters of an audiobook while my baby was sleeping.
Now, my little son, he was sleeping soundly, he was safe, and during the time I actually was going through two different chapters of a book I was reading. I say “reading,” obviously it was an audiobook so I use that term loosely. But then today I was actually getting our adventure van. It’s a Sprinter van that we had converted so we could travel around the world and have adventures while doing the things that we love.
While I was there, the gentleman apologized for me having to wait because it was going to take an extra 30 minutes. To me, I thought, “Hey, no big deal.” I threw on my headphones and continued digesting that audiobook. For me, there was no downtime. The audiobook I was digesting was actually contrarian to my viewpoints, meaning I knew that the subject matter and the person who wrote this book had opposing opinions of my own. I listened to it deliberately because I wanted another voice. I wanted somebody to give me in my mind another point of view, a contrarian point of view so I could see how the other side was presenting their information, so I could see if perhaps they changed my mind. Maybe there’s a point of view I hadn’t seen yet. You know, I think feeding your mind is one of the questions I get asked about the most.
When I’m doing a 90-day challenge with a client, soul comes up the most by far, but another area that comes up often is “what can I do in the area of my mind?” Something that’s very easy to do is to use audiobooks. Now, you can get free audiobooks online. If you’ve gone through our seven-day course to being the author of your own story, there are a few resources there where you can just actually get free audiobooks. It’s totally legal and legit. You don’t have to use Torrentz or anything like that. But you can also use software like Audible. I use Audible as well as downloading the free audiobooks, and I find it to be fantastically great.
You know, books are about coming to an average of like 9 to $12, which to me isn’t a lot of money for a new idea or a new thought. I’m constantly feeding my brain. Now, oftentimes I’ll pick one subject matter for each month or each 90 days and really dive deep into that, but every once in a while I do like some entertainment or I want a contrarian point of view. I want to see how other people are looking at a subject.
What I’m going to ask you is where in your life do you have this downtime, commuting? Is it walking around the block with your baby? Is it sitting in the auto shop? Where do you have downtime that you can add audiobook into your life?
That’s it for me today.
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